Any little kid who has received an unsigned note stating “You are ugly” would understand the connection between the schoolyard bully and the person who takes cheap shots at others via the Internet using a pseudonym.
One is protected from retaliation by size and strength, while the other is protected by his anonymity. This appears to be about to change.
A series of recent court decisions has paved the way to either unmask the Internet bullies who comment on various blogs, or shut them up. It seems that the public, as represented by our courts, has had its collective fill of the misspelled and ungrammatical spewings that masquerade as public comment.
Newspapers, including this one, have long had a policy of not printing letters to the editor from anonymous sources. There are a number of reasons for this, including legal ones. However, the majority of anonymous letters (people still send them the odd time) tend to be of the poison pen variety, and of questionable value to the reading public.
Someone wants to complain about a neighbour’s cat, musical tastes or drinking habits, in a public forum while hiding his or her identity. Perhaps the writer is a timid soul who fears retaliation. Perhaps, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the writer gets a thrill from “looking like the flower but being the serpent under it.” Or perhaps the writer can neither justify, nor prove, what he or she is saying.
What the writers of poison pen anonymous letters and blogs seem to share are a sense of moral outrage, a firm conviction that “someone should do something” – as long as the someone is someone else – and an unerring ability to focus on trivia. The minute an editor states the letter has to be signed (with the writer’s name, not that mysterious judge of all that is wrong with the world, known as “A Concerned Citizen”) the writer usually disappears in a cloud of righteous indignation with a wail of, “But then they would know who I am.”
Soon enough, the Internet version of A Concerned Citizen could be subject to the same rules as writers of anonymous letters.
Some people are fighting the great unmasking on the grounds of freedom of speech, stating there are things that need to be said despite the bad grammar and the occasional profanity rampant in blogs. The anonymity of the Internet gives people the freedom to state their opinions as bluntly and as honestly as they want.
Unfortunately, too many poison pen bloggers take advantage of the opportunity to spew venom that would get them sued if said face-to-face or in any of the traditional media. Does most of what they blog fall into the “need to be said” category? Read the stuff. There are only so many ways to say a public figure cheats.
Lies and insults, either spoken or in print, can and do hurt. Allowing people to put that garbage where anyone can read it, as long as the content falls well short of Grade 3 English, and the signature is something like “vishusNnastyhahaha,” is wrong.
Years ago, when newspapers stopped publishing poison pen letters, they lost nothing except a scandalized giggle or two. Those old letters were fun to read, but they rarely contained anything more than lurid gossip. On with the great unmasking. It is about time the blogging bullies were flushed out of their hiding places. A bit of daylight and fresh air would do wonders for some of the Internet sites that invite no-holds-barred public comment.
In the meantime, we invite your letters to the editor about matters of public concern – please sign them and include a contact number.